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Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#311

Post by simias »

tguedes wrote: post #160
wut42 wrote: post #16

> The deal can be viewed as a doubling down on business strategy that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, articulated at a conference in 2016: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” he had said, referring to Amazon's diverse business divisions. This part is a real nugget.

From https://stratechery.com/2021/distribution-and-demand/ : `I do get the argument that Prime Video is a waste of money for Amazon; Brad Stone notes in his new book Amazon Unbound that “there was little evidence of a connection between viewing and purchasing behavior” and that “any correlation was also obfuscated by the fact that Prime was growing rapidly on its own.”` Is that nugget actually true or is Bezos just o…

I find it hard to believe as well, although of course if you subscribe to prime for movies and TV you're probably more likely to use it for free deliveries as well.

But if the plan is to make Prime more popular there seem to be many, many simpler and probably cheaper ways to do that. It's as if McDonalds started a movie studio in order to sell Movie + Big Mac bundles.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#312

Post by hnbad »

shmageggy wrote: post #182
wut42 wrote: post #16

> The deal can be viewed as a doubling down on business strategy that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, articulated at a conference in 2016: “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” he had said, referring to Amazon's diverse business divisions. This part is a real nugget.

That blew my mind. We have so much sci-fi depicting the evil mega-corp that's it has become a trope, yet we're just lumbering along towards that exact future.

Carlos Maza's video on the pandemic (and Trump) provides a good explanation of this phenomenon IMO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJaE_BvLK6U

Basically we all see ourselves as the main character and don't think boring (i.e. systemic) problems will affect us. I'm not going to die from COVID like the rest because I'm special -- I'll die in an important way when it's narratively convenient, not like an extra killed off in act one to establish the stakes. Evil mega corps won't creep up on me, they'll introduce themselves spectacularly in a way that directly challenges me personally in a way that still allows me to defeat them and complete my hero's journey.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#313

Post by trsohmers »

refracture wrote: post #237
xixixao wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started watching SG1 again (I saw it incomplete as a kid). It’s incredibly good. It pushes rationalism and feminism in a sane way that I’m not sure would happen in today’s environment. It’s incredibly rich in historical references and concepts. It’s rarely dumb and often preempts cliches. It’s still worth watching imho (and is much less known that Star Trek in US).

My parents watched a lot of sci fi TV when I was kid, SG-1 is the only show that I ever actually sat down and watched more than the occasional episode of. I remember being struck by a scene that was (I believe?) pretty early in the series where Sam's about to fight some guy hand to hand; Jack protests this (but not in a way that makes it clear whether he thinks a woman shouldn't do it or if he's just unsure of her fi…

S1E3 Emancipation... one of the most disliked episodes by most fans but I agree that the scene was handled well... but the rest of the episode is not good. The writer of the episode (Katharyn Powers, who only worked on SG1 in season 1) was also the writer of the Star Trek TNG first season episode "Code Of Honor", which is frequently considered in the bottom 3 episodes of any Star Trek series, and many find very racist.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#314

Post by dhosek »

divs1210 wrote: post #225
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Piracy is competition to bad content behavior. It's a meaningful consumer response to monopoly, balkanization and other anti-consumer practices.

THIS. Forcing consumers to sign up to 10 platforms to watch 10 movies will no doubt lead to a shift back to torrents. YouTube is pretty good in this regard, as it allows paying for renting a single movie for a weekend for a reasonable price.

Amazon and Apple also have stream rentals. That said, I have Netflix (free with my T-mobile phone service) and HBO (free with my AT&T fiber internet) and Apple+ (free with the recently purchased iPads for the kids) and Hoopla (free from the library) and Kanopy (free from the library) and Disney+ (we actually pay for this one) and I never feel the need to say, I must watch this movie which isn't available on one of the services right now. If anything, I have too many options of what to watch.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#315

Post by lotsofpulp »

tomjen3 wrote: post #256
margaretdouglas wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cable providers were charging you $80/mo for commercial laden network aggregation. You cut that cord and complain when paying less for more content, without commercials, and is on demand, because it is unbundled and you need to manage each $5-15 "network" fee individually, instead of a single itemized bill. This is like complaining you have to pay for NBC to watch Friends when you'd much prefer to watch it on ABC so…

We never paid for networks, we paid for a handful of shows that were worth watching, which happened to be on different channels because physics. Now they are on different platforms, because no good reason at all. A copyright holder of a creative work should be able to set the price, but should not be able to use their monopolistic powers to control who pays the price. Let each channel decide if they want to buy a giv…

Why is a channel needed? You can go straight from copyright holder to viewer.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#316

Post by leifg »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #23

So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.

I wonder if we’ll see some kind of cable box equivalent where private companies will go ahead and bundle a subset of all the content on the streaming service into a package to sell you. Possibly subsidized with ads…

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#317

Post by cbetti »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #23

So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.

I think in the near term a combination of good content and enjoyable user experience with viewing application is going to drive adoption.

I have a Roku and Samsung SmartOS TV. The only independent playback experiences that come close to Netflix, Prime Video, and Paramount+ in my limited experience are Plex, Apple TV, and for legacy stuff, TiVo.

I'll take this weird world of locked-in distribution channels for a few years while innovation progresses, and hope Plex and Apple TV win once innovation stops.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#318

Post by delecti »

vishnugupta wrote: post #85

My thesis is that to justify their P/E and valuation Amazon has no option but to keep expanding into new business lines. A side effect of this expansion is lack of attention to their existing lines of businesses. For instance, Amazon retail UX and website has largely remained unchanged for like well over a decade and in fact gotten worse as they cram more and more things to sell within a screen. Same with AWS, quite…

Having worked at Amazon, things that are doing fine will definitely get put on the back burner, but I don't see why that's a problem. Why the need for everything to keep changing if it's working fine?

Amazon has plenty of problems, but they're not Google; products stay supported for a long time. My three Echo devices are 5, 4, and 3 years old, and of them all work perfectly fine.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#319

Post by jccalhoun »

scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #23

So what we're seeing is a repeat of the film industry from 1930's-1950's. You want to see a Paramount movie, you must go to a Paramount theater. Today you want to watch an Apple show you must go to Apple's VOD. We could really use laws that force, once again, some sort of separation between production and distribution. Better stuff gets made in this kind of ecosystem.

There are similarities but US vs Paramount was more about the dealings with the theaters and the movie studios and not the consumers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic....

If there was some kind of anti-trust to go on with streaming sources it might be more likely to be about something like Amazon only having its content on Fire devices or forcing Roku to only have Amazon content and not Netflix or something.

Re: Amazon acquires MGM for $8.5B

#320

Post by mythz »

ssharp wrote: post #170
mythz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except watching online is nowhere near as inconvenient as only watching movies from theaters in your area. It will most will likely consolidate to 4 major players so we're looking at 4 subscriptions to watch most new content. There's nothing stopping production companies from producing content, if it's compelling enough they'll still be able to license it out to the big players. When everything's online the primary d…

> It will most will likely consolidate to 4 major players so we're looking at 4 subscriptions to watch most new content. How do you see this playing out when there have been so many big investments by traditional players to put forward new streaming services? The major players went from Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon and have now added Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Apple TV+, and Paramount+, with more on the way. Untangling…

Hulu is majority owned by Disney who'll likely want to keep it running as a separate subscription service like ESPN in order to charge multiple content subscriptions.

The major players I expect to be around after the streaming wars ends is: Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Apple. I expect most of the other platforms are going to end up as premium channels that you can subscribe to and watch on the other platforms, which you can do already in AppleTV+ and Amazon Prime.

HBO and Hulu will be around as long as they have exclusive content they can't stream on other platforms. I don't expect HBO's content & licensing strategy of limiting it to higher margin cable services will last. In Australia you can only watch HBO through Foxtel which I'll never do, basically anything that's not accessible from Netflix, Prime, Disney+ or AppleTV+ doesn't exist for us.

If the platforms were banned from producing their own content I expect it would dramatically favor platform owners like AppleTV+ where most iOS users would use to watch their content on as they can do now. Owning the UX would make them like Amazon.com storefront for 3rd party sellers, giving them unilateral power over the discovery of content, e.g. over time they could favor their own content, which is behavior I'd expect from Amazon, for Apple I think they'd be happy to just own the streaming platform as another lock-in & drawcard for iOS users.

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